Cristiano Ronaldo is Ozymandias
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch.
The greats don’t age. How could they?
Their commanding genius, that manifests in performances generations have never seen before and may never see again brings with it a sense of infinity. These are careers that are immortalised in statues standing for the world to see and thus remember with unanimous fondness forever, right?
The statue of ‘Cristiano’ has stood unmoved and proud, adored by international crowds for many years. It is only now that the ‘traveller from an antique land’ stumbles upon a shattered statue standing in a desolate land.
The conclusion of Ronaldo’s story is not an entirely unique one. Looking back through history highlights parallels to the kings that used to be.
The literary classic Ozymandias has a traveller tell the story of his experience of a statue, once colossal in size, history and value.
This same statue, with the gloating words of:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
engraved onto its base, now stands destroyed.
The vast and trunkless legs of stone are all that remain attached to that boasting pedestal. And perhaps after Cristiano’s final true swansong of an 18 goal Premier League Season, those legs — the vehicles of the works others had to look on and despair, now stand trunkless, heavy and in stone.
The sneer of cold command, sculpted into the face of this gigantic statue, embodies a lifetime of experience. This is a king: cold, proud, great. But that same proud head of the champion lays sunken, detached from its body, buried in the sands of an empty desert that stretch towards nothingness in every direction.
In what took Shelley a fleeting moment to write is a story that Cristiano has written through 37 long and difficult years of perseverance and hard-work. The same irrational belief of undeniable inevitability that Cristiano demonstrates now is the same perspective that took him up each step and into the pantheon with the all-timers.
Cause and effect has it so it shouldn’t be massively shocking to see Ronaldo react in the way he has done. Does that make those actions correct or good? No, but it goes a little bit towards making those actions a little more understandable.
The reality is, for the 99.999…%, time on the planet is too short to reach a level at which a statue-worthy, king of kings status will be actualised. To come to terms with the loss of that is incomprehensible, not only for those who fail to reach that summit, but often for the mountaineers themselves too.
The journey down the other side of the mountain is one that is gradual. It happens day by day, without much visible or sudden change until suddenly you stand at the base, with the entire mountain behind you wondering how and when it all happened.
The only undeniable inevitability isn’t the performances or the accolades of the greats that include or have come before Cristiano.
There is nothing powerful or strong enough that it can remain powerful or strong forever. Empires fall. New empires rise. The story of Ozymandias bestows that lesson upon us.
Ultimately, the only true inevitability is father time itself.
An article and video by Umir.